The Work of Wolves (20 page)

"I was on top of Tower Hill," Earl said. "I saw the horses from up there. I went down to look at them."

"Not much happens on Tower Hill but parties."

"There was a party. But I wasn't drinking."

Earl watched small bubbles rise and burst in the solution. A whitish foam gathered along the rim of the tub. The calling meadowlarks called again.

"Mom," Earl said. "Sometimes I can't. Something like this. I can't."

"Your mother is a fine woman, nephew. Never forget that."

"She won't even let you in the house. You're family. That isn't the way it should be."

Norm returned to his chair, sat, laid the stick across his knees again. Earl waited a few moments, then returned to his own chair, and they gazed at the fire from their different places. Norm was silent for so long that if Earl hadn't known him, he would have thought he'd gone to sleep. The meadowlarks went through a half-dozen calls and answers, and the thousands of grasshoppers in the prairie around the motor home without wheels that served as Norm's house chewed on the vegetation.

"Those two meadowlarks," Norm finally said. "They've returned from last year."

"The same ones? How do you know?"

"Their songs."

Norm was about to talk. But first he had to direct Earl's attention to something else. As if he wanted their talk to be part of a larger conversation. Or wanted the meadowlarks' conversation to be part of their talk. And wanted Earl to listen to the entire thing. Out of respect for his uncle, Earl listened to the meadowlarks call and call. Then he said, "They both sound the same to me."

"If you sat here long enough, you would hear the difference."

Earl listened again. The birds sounded identical.
The Deaf Indian,
Earl thought,
listens intently.

But Norm interrupted Earl's interior documentary. "Sometimes I think I'll listen well enough," he said, "that I'll know individual grasshoppers by the sound of their wings. That would be a good thing."

"Why?"

Norm chuckled. "I'm not sure," he said.

Then he said, "Your dad was a sweet guy, Earl."

Earl shifted in the chair's webbing. He'd come to ask his uncle about the duty Carson and Willi had laid in his lap. He wanted to know if Norm thought it was his duty. If he had to accept it. But asking his uncle anything often involved long journeys to the answers. Even to the questions. That was all right. For a while Earl could forget the horses and Willi's repetitive insistence that they had to do something about them and Carson's strange, disturbing presence—the steady, unwavering, impassive way he regarded Earl, in his eyes some mystery Earl couldn't decipher. When Earl couldn't detect the tiny ridge of bone that Carson said was a crack in Orlando's fetlock, Carson had taken Earl's fingers in his own and guided them to the ridge, rubbed them lightly over it. It had been the oddest gesture Earl could have imagined. They had squatted, touching at the shoulders, and Carson had reached out with Earl's fingers and rubbed them as if they were his own against Orlando's skin.

"Feel that?" he'd asked.

Earl watched his fingers, moved by someone else. "Yeah," he said. "I feel it now."

"That's what I'm talkin about."

But now Norm was talking, and Earl could forget that tiny crack in the bone, and his fingers moved over it by someone else's hand.

"A sweet guy," Norm repeated. "My little brother, the Sweet Guy. That's what we need, hanh?—an Indian comic book hero. The Sweet Guy. Your mother ever tell you about those trees?"

Those trees: Earl had been hearing about those trees all his life. He didn't reply.

"They're a marriage proposal," Norm said.

Earl didn't know that part of it, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. "Mom says she can hear my father's voice when the wind blows in those trees," he said. "But, you know, they just sound like trees to me. Trees and wind."

"And meadowlarks sound like meadowlarks to you. You pay attention to your mother."

Then, periodically rising to stir the tub's contents with his stick, Norm told how he'd gone to the nursery in Pierre with his little brother, Cyrus, to get trees. The people at the nursery couldn't figure out why an Indian would be planting trees. They glanced at Norm and Cy, who stood near the bags of fertilizer, waiting for assistance, then glanced away again and attended to someone else.

"I'm not sure how long Cy would've stood there," Norm said. "But I got impatient. I was drinking in those days, and I wasn't that far out of Vietnam, and drinking and Nam both had a powerful effect on my manners. I was, you might say, engaging the clerk in a discussion when Cy walked between us and asked, 'Could you figure how much twenty of those trees over there would cost?' He points to some little saplings stacked against the wall. The clerk is so glad to have something to do not involving me that he whips out a pencil and comes up with a figure I could see when he looked at Cy he thought was a number no Indian would be willing to pay, for it didn't matter how many trees.

"But your dad just smiled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out five hundred-dollar bills and fanned them out like he wasn't sure it was enough, and says, 'Looks like I can handle that. Make it twenty-five.'

"The clerk strained his eyeballs staring at that wad of bills, nephew. But he got more helpful then. We all three loaded trees into the back of Cy's pickup and then went inside to pay for them. The clerk punched numbers into the register and tallied up the bill and announced it, tax and all. And what does Cy do? He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a checkbook. He slaps it down on the counter and writes out a check and rips it out and hands it over. I tell you, nephew, I had to go over and lean on those fertilizer bags and read the hazard warnings on them and imagine getting cancer just to keep from laughing out loud. The clerk was just staring at Cy's hand writing out that check, like he didn't believe an Indian could use a pen. The last thing he wanted was a check from an Indian, but he'd just helped that Indian load twenty-five trees. Cyripped that check out and held it out, and the clerk looked like he thought it was going to give him herpes, so Cy laid it on the counter and said, 'You've been very helpful. I'll tell my friends to come here and buy trees, too. If I have any questions, I'll be sure to call you.'

"Then we go out the door. As soon as it shuts, I bust out laughing. But Cy's quiet and serious. Sweet, hanh? He just climbs into the pickup and starts it and heads out of the parking lot. He looks up and down the street for traffic, then pulls out nice and easy, not to bump those trees around, and says, 'The real lesson for that guy's gonna be when that check turns out to be good. That'll upset his whole world. He won't sleep for days.'

"That was the way your dad was, Earl. It'd been me, I'd a had that clerk by the neck, and he'd a had me in jail. But Cy saw right to the heart of things. He figured out how to make things work so even a guy like that clerk didn't know what was happening to him."

They'd rolled the windows down and headed south down Highway 79, away from Lake Oahe and the Missouri breaks until they were traveling over rolling prairie. "Ain't it crazy," Norm had said to Cyrus, "a prejudiced little white guy has to tell a couple of Indians how to plant trees?"

"Not so crazy," Cy had replied. "Indians didn't plant trees."

Outside the windshield the land rolled away like a sheet on a line billowed horizontally by a strong wind, snapped into hills.

"Indians burned things," Cy said. "Indians and lightning. The prairie did its own planting."

"So us Indians got lightning knowledge."

"That's it, brother." Cy grinned at Norm.

"So why are you planting trees?"

"You use lightning knowledge and start setting fires, you got to be able to move. That's why the old-time Indians lived in tipis. One reason. Even the lightning goes back into the sky. It doesn't build a house and settle down in the middle of a fire."

Norm could see that this was true.

"White people have a funny way of doing things, enit?" Cy said. "They find a forest, they cut it down so they can settle there. They find a prairie, they plant trees so they can settle there. Find a swamp, they drain it, but if they find a desert, they make a lake to irrigate it. Backwards thinking."

"They just want everything to be the same."

"Know what a modern-day tipi is? A motor home. Used to be us Indians lived in tipis so we could get away from fires and chase buffalo. Now the white guys live in motor homes so they can get away from all the places they ruined and chase golf balls. They stick us on the rez because they can't handle all that roaming we did. Then they build roads to make roaming easier and put wheels on the tipis. What is the lesson from this, big brother? To be an Indian now, you must buy a motor home and learn to golf."

They laughed, and Norm, telling the story, laughed again, and Earl laughed, too.

"When things get that crazy," Cyrus said, "you have to do something different. So I'm planting trees. Besides, Lorna likes trees."

He smiled across the pickup at his older brother.

"So we got us a marriage proposal in the back of this pickup?"

"We do, brother."

"Used to be a man would bring horses."

"Lorna would rather have trees."

"So," Norm said to Earl, "we spent the whole day, me and Cy, planting trees around your mother's house. Lorna'd bought it when she came back from her big-city life in Denver. I was drinking back then, but I spent that whole day sober, helping my little brother propose to your mother. Hadn't worked that hard since I left Vietnam—digging those holes, putting little sticks in, packing the dirt back, watering. Hanh—it was good work"

Then—Cyrus told Norm about it later—Cy sat in the house and waited for Lorna to return from work. By the time she did, it was dark, and Cy had moved to a chair outside. He let Lorna drive up, and then he rose and moved toward her, flashlight in his hand. When she stepped from the car, he clicked it on to pool light at her feet.

"I thought you might be late tonight," he said. "So I got new batteries." He wiggled the light at her feet, lapped her toes with it.

"I want to show you something," he said.

"I'm awfully tired, Cy."

"Won't take no time."

"It can't wait until morning?"

Cy clicked the flashlight off, then on, then off, then stood in the dark.

"It can," he said. "But I can't."

So she let herself be led across the patchy ground to each of the twenty-five trees. He clicked them individually into the flashlight's beam: the yellow pools of light, the clawed shadows on the ground. After all twenty-five, they stood side by side in the dark.

"So you planted trees on my place for me," Lorna said. "That's good, Cy. They'll look real nice some day."

"I wanted you to see them, you know?"

"My feet are killing me. Let's go in. How about some light?"

He gave her light for her feet. They started toward the house.

"They need to be watered every other day," he said.

"How long will it take for them to grow?"

He snapped off the light. She stopped moving and turned back to him. "I'm wearing dress shoes, Cy. You want me to break an ankle?"

"No. But I was wondering. Those trees—how long it takes for them to grow. Do you think we could find that out together?"

By the time Norm finished telling all this, the sun had moved lower in the sky, and he had risen several times to add wood to the fire. The meadowlarks had stopped their calling. Norm rose from his chair yet again to peer into the washtub. Earl sat without moving. When he was young, he'd hated those trees. At times his mother had seemed to care more about them than she had about him. She had made him spend so much time watering them, holding a garden hose or hauling water in pails where the hose wouldn't reach. In dry summers when their shallow well ran dry, she had even bought water. The trees had seemed nothing but a burden to Earl, and he had wished they would all shrivel and die, and on those hot summer days, when he'd seen the pickup with the green fiberglass water tank on the back turn off the county road, bringing them water, he had complained bitterly to his mother of the waste of it, water being poured into the ground and the money that might have bought something else just sinking away. Useless. Just so those weak and fragile trees would live. Earl had hated their weakness and fragility.

He had never heard the story as Norm had just told it. His mother and father never had found out together how long it took those trees to grow. So much of the world suddenly seemed to Earl weak and fragile. Everything vulnerable. Everything in need of care. Whenever his mother had told him to be careful, all Earl had ever heard was to be cautious. He'd never heard
careful
mean
full of care.
To avoid contempt for those things that needed care. Voices in the wind: such wind, such wind.

To take his mind away from it all, his childishness and regret, he asked, "Do you live in a motor home because of what my father said about them being tipis?"

Norm turned and stared at his home, considering the question. "Maybe," he finally said. "You could be right, nephew. Hanh. Maybe that is why I got it. I never thought of that. Maybe I should get myself a set of golf clubs, too. I could practice my driving and putting right here."

He gazed around at the prairie spreading in all directions. "Plenty of prairie dog holes," he said. "Just stick some pointy flags in them."

He nodded, thinking of it. "My home," he said. "My little, personal piece of New Jersey."

Then he got talking again and told how he'd acquired the motor home. He'd been working at Brad Monk's Service along 1-90, and a retired couple had blown the engine on their motor home a mile from the station. By the time they had walked in ninety-degree heat along the shoulder of the freeway, semis blasting past them, ripping at their clothes with the force of their slipstreams, the husband had learned more about his wife than he had in the previous forty years of marriage. He confided much of it to Norm in the cab of the wrecker Norm drove out to the derelict motor home. The wife had never wanted to buy the motor home in the first place, and she'd loved the home they'd sold to purchase it. "I had no idea," the husband told Norm glumly. "I thought this was fun for her. An adventure." During that ninety-degree walk, she'd told him she was going back to New Jersey whether he came or not, and she didn't give a damn about the sonofabitching motor home—"I didn't even know she could swear"—and didn't give a damn if they lost the whole damn forty-thousand dollars the thing had cost them, they could make that up by traveling only to see their grandchildren and doing that by car—that is, if they stayed married that long, and that was up to him, and she damn well wouldn't try to influence him one way or the other.